Fusion-io to Acquire IO Turbine

SALT LAKE CITY--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Fusion-io,
Inc. (NYSE:FIO), a provider of a next-generation shared data
decentralization platform, today announced that it has entered into a
definitive agreement to acquire IO Turbine, Inc., a provider of caching
solutions for virtual environments. Under terms of the agreement,
Fusion-io will pay up to approximately $95 million, subject to purchase
price adjustments, for all outstanding securities of IO Turbine. The
consideration is payable in cash and stock, provided that the cash
portion may not exceed $35 million. The transaction is expected to close
by the end of August 2011, subject to final closing conditions.

The acquisition is a key part of Fusion’s strategy to enable enterprise
customers to increase the utilization, performance and efficiency of
their datacenter resources and extract greater value from their
information assets. Having partnered closely for a number of months,
Fusion-io and IO Turbine have a shared philosophy for solving datacenter
inefficiencies. The integration of IO Turbine’s software into Fusion’s
platform will enable traditional storage infrastructures to keep up with
the increasing demands of virtualized servers and expands Fusion’s
market opportunities to both new and existing customers.

“IO Turbine’s software is uniquely architected to take advantage of
flash memory in the server to solve the I/O bottlenecks, the inhibitor
to the adoption of enterprise virtualization,” said David Flynn,
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Fusion-io. “We believe
integrating ioMemory and IO Turbine adds a critical and previously
missing performance component to virtualized IT environments that will
accelerate the adoption of Fusion-io technology. This acquisition also
underscores our focus on providing customers with an enterprise solution
that features software and hardware components designed to accelerate
their business’ full suite of applications.”

San Jose, California-based IO Turbine was founded to address data supply
constraints in virtual environments. While adoption and affordability of
flash technologies has provided performance advances in virtualization,
effective utilization of flash storage in a shared, virtualized
environment has remained complex.

The IO Turbine software takes advantage of flash local to the server,
delivering improved performance for virtualized workloads by holding
data close to where it is used. This approach avoids the need for
expensive performance-oriented networked storage systems and memory
appliances that struggle to deliver performance from the far end of a
network, instead allowing enterprises to use cost optimized shared
storage systems. The marriage of ioMemory and IO Turbine software
improves ROI by increasing the number of virtual machines per physical
server. Moreover, this makes it feasible to virtualize data intensive
applications that were previously difficult to migrate to virtualized
environments while maintaining performance. Enterprises will be able to
virtualize their entire suite of applications and finally realize the
benefit of running a single unified virtualized environment.

“In addition to delivering performance that finally unleashes the
potential of virtualization, we believe the combined Fusion-io and IO
Turbine solution will also boost efficiency by reducing the costs
associated with running expensive backend shared storage, as well as
extend the lifespan of enterprises’ current storage area networks,”
noted Rich Boberg, CEO of IO Turbine. “By integrating the IO Turbine
virtualization software with Fusion’s ioMemory platform, we believe
enterprises will finally be able to accelerate even the most I/O
intensive applications in virtualized environments.”

At closing, Fusion-io will add approximately 20 IO Turbine employees to
its engineering team, with an additional approximately five employees
across other areas.

Fusion-io has pioneered a next generation storage memory platform for
shared data decentralization that significantly improves the processing
capabilities within a datacenter by relocating process-critical, or
"active", data from centralized storage to the server where it is being
processed, a methodology referred to as data decentralization. Fusion’s
integrated hardware and software solutions leverage non-volatile memory
to significantly increase datacenter efficiency and offers enterprise
grade performance, reliability, availability and manageability. Fusion’s
data decentralization platform can transform legacy architectures into
next generation datacenters and allows enterprises to consolidate or
significantly reduce complex and expensive high performance storage,
high performance networking and memory-rich servers. Fusion’s platform
enables enterprises to increase the utilization, performance and
efficiency of their datacenter resources and extract greater value from
their information assets.

Note on Forward-looking Statements

Certain statements in this release may constitute "forward-looking
statements" within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange
Act of 1934 and Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, including,
but are not limited to, statements concerning our business strategy and
our anticipated acquisition of IO Turbine, including the terms, timing
and expected benefits of the transaction. These statements are based on
current expectations and assumptions regarding future events and
business performance and involve certain risks and uncertainties that
could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained,
anticipated, or implied in any forward-looking statement, including, but
not limited to, risks associated with the failure of conditions
precedent to the closing of the transaction, the potential that
Fusion-io or its customers may not realize the benefits that Fusion-io
currently expects from the IO Turbine acquisition, risks inherent in the
integration and combination of complex products or technologies, risks
associated with our acquisition strategy and disruptions in our business
and operations as a result of acquisitions, and such other risks set
forth in the registration statements and reports that Fusion-io files
with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which are available on
the Investor Relations section of our website at www.fusionio.com.
You should not rely upon forward-looking statements as predictions of
future events. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in
the forward-looking statements are reasonable, we cannot guarantee that
the future results, levels of activity, performance or events and
circumstances reflected in the forward-looking statements will be
achieved or will occur. Fusion-io undertakes no obligation to update
publicly any forward-looking statement for any reason after the date of
this press release.